


M.O.D. are you out there?

by pollyrepeat



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-10
Updated: 2013-12-10
Packaged: 2018-01-04 05:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1077037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollyrepeat/pseuds/pollyrepeat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Look at me</i>, Skye thought, but the creepy telepathic bio-engineering that had been going on in the basement of tonight's party clearly hadn't rubbed off on her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	M.O.D. are you out there?

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [chaneen](http://chaneen.livejournal.com/) and to [Jones](http://archiveofourown.org/users/jonesandashes) for beta duties. <3

Skye popped her head in to Simmons' bunk the night after watching her toss herself out into the air, whipped out of sight like a scene straight out of Lost, back when it was good and Skye had been, like, fifteen and scrawny and more than a little lost, herself. "Hey," she said. "I'm making nachos and cheese. You want some greasy Yay I'm Alive victory snacks?"

Simmons was curled casually around a mug of tea. Simmons was a bit of a cliche, sometimes, in her matchy-matchy ties and her blazers and her sensible office shoes. Her eyes were very wide, even now, hours later; brown and soft and kind and maybe a little shocky. Skye had half-expected to find Fitz in the corner, or maybe hiding under the pile of Simmons' blankets, but there was no sign of him: just Simmons, and her tea, and a tablet full of equations because Simmons' great big brain didn't ever turn off.

"I'm not actually certain my stomach can handle grease, at the moment," Simmons said, but she carefully untangled herself from the blanket and let Skye take hold of her elbow, balancing her and tugging so that she could stand without spilling any tea.

Simmons ate all the nachos, and half of Coulson's stash of frozen chocolate McCain cake, picked up in Canada along with a man who caused floods when he snapped his fingers. The package was carefully and optimistically labelled with Coulson's name in permanent marker, which Skye cheerfully ignored, and together they got through three hours' worth of Skye's YouTube favourites list and also Ward, stumbling, shirtless, into the kitchenette at three in the morning to scowl disapprovingly at them for shouting "DADDY LONG LEGS WHAT ARE YOU" at each other and disrupting his beauty sleep.

" _Very_ nice," Simmons said, approvingly, when Ward finally accepted a slice of Coulson's cake as a peace offering and slouched back off to bed.

"Yup," Skye said, but her heart wasn't in it. She crossed out Coulson's name and wrote "Ward Was Here" on the cake's plastic lid before she put it back in the freezer.

//

If Skye was casual about it, she could flop down on the couch beside Simmons while pretending to be very involved with something on her phone, and she could knock her knee against Simmons’ own in a friendly sort of way, like a hello, and Simmons would remain engrossed in her fancy schmancy science work on her tablet and not move away at all.

Today, Simmons was not working on her tablet, but rather tap-tap-tapping away at her phone. Skye squinted at the screen. “Mum & Dad.” Simmons was texting her parents.

“Awww,” Skye said, before she could stop herself, awash in a heady mix of confusion and jealousy and the sort of warm fuzzies that accompanied gifs of small puppies trying to figure out how stairs worked.

“Sorry?” Simmons said, phone lowering to her lap while she turned her head, giving Skye the full weight of her attention. She didn’t exit out of the texting app, though -- this was only a pause.

Luckily, Skye still had the cutebabyotters tumblr up -- _not_ to be confused with dailyotters -- and she turned her phone around to show Simmons.

“Aww,” Simmons said, being a good sport, and went back to her texting. A strand of hair had escaped from its ponytail, and Skye decided not to reach out and tuck it behind Simmons' ear.

Simmons had _parents_. Living, breathing parents. She was on speaking terms with both of them, and spoke to them semi-regularly. No one ever said anything, but from the very beginning, Skye had gotten the distinct impression that moms and dads 'round these here parts were sort of the familial equivalent of a unicorn.

Skye fit right in, really.

//

It was the middle of the night when Skye rolled back into the Bus, flush with victory from a night out hacking into large, suspicious corporations and eating tiny expensive mushrooms on sticks. She made for the lab without bothering to change out of her slinky gold dress, because her boobs looked, quite frankly, amazing, and Simmons had stared at them unabashedly during the mission briefing before giving Skye an approving nod and two thumbs up.

Simmons was sleepy-eyed, resting her forehead against one of the shiny black microscopes and yawning hugely into her hands. She had nice hands, long-fingered and precise, and Skye's stomach did a completely obnoxious and predictable round of butterflies. "Oh, good," Simmons said, without looking up. "One down, three to go."

"May said two more hours for the rest of the team," Skye said. _Look at me_ , she thought, but the creepy telepathic bio-engineering that had been going on in the basement of tonight's party clearly hadn't rubbed off on her. She stepped out of her stilettos, instead, curling her toes against the coolness of the lab floor.

Fitz was doing something complicated with the hologram table, zooming in and exploding little cogs and gears into their component parts, examining each one and tossing it into a growing, unearthly trash heap at the far edge of the table. He paused to peer over at her bare feet, which made him shudder. "Please put your shoes back on," he said. "Bare feet in the lab? That's not safe."

"You try wearing wearing these," Skye said, kicking the shoes his way. "Trust me. Bare feet are safer."

"I think I have a pair of slippers in my storage locker," Simmons said, looking up at last. There was a red smudge on her forehead from the microscope, and her smile, aimed directly at Skye, was warm and conspiratorial. "You can wear them, if you like."

"I -- thanks," Skye said. "Are you sure?" Simmons' attention was wandering again, eyes drawn out to the gloomy darkness of the storage bay, Lola glinting dully in the low light, and so Skye pulled out the big guns: she ran her hand through the top of her hair, mussing it up and letting it tumble out from between her fingers and down her back. 

Simmons was oblivious, but Fitz's head jerked up immediately.

"I know that move," he hissed at her, when Simmons picked up a test tube and wandered out of the room.

"That bat signal was _not for you_ , Robin," Skye said.

"Oh, I know it wasn't," Fitz said. "You think you're the first girl to -- to toss her hair at Simmons?" Skye couldn't work out what Fitz's face was doing -- something complicated.

"No," Skye said.

"Well -- good," Fitz said.

"Great," Skye said.

Fitz poked disconsolately at his holograms for another moment, ignoring the way Skye was trying to burn a hole into his forehead with her eyes, then abruptly shoved the whole gleaming blue heap into nothingness and heaved a huge, long-suffering sigh. He pointed a finger at her. "No breaking of hearts."

"Is this a _shovel talk_?" Skye asked, incredulous.

"Well, to be honest, I was hoping Simmons would be giving it to you about me," Fitz said, all in a rush, and flushed from the back of his neck right up to his ears. "But! I can be the bigger man, here."

Skye choked, for a moment, on six different jokes that tried to come crawling out of her mouth simultaneously; that was probably for the best. Fitz was, in the end, becoming a friend. More importantly, he was Simmons' best codependent buddy, and it was therefore worth preventing his oncoming death by lethal blush.

"Thanks?" she said.

Fitz leaned way over the table, eyes intense. "She likes your black shirt," he told her. "The --" he gestured. "The low-cut one. She likes novelty cufflinks and making snow angels and prank wars and winning."

"Who's winning?" Simmons said, coming back in; she'd swapped out the test tube for a pair of soft-looking moccasins, which meant Skye was going to have to go and dig the missing test tube out of the storage cabinet sometime tomorrow.

"I am, obviously," Fitz told her, not missing a beat, and caught Skye's eye when Simmons crouched down and tapped Skye's bare left foot, comparing it to the slipper she held up beside it.

"Should fit," she said, and without warning reached out and eased Skye's foot in, fingers cool around her ankle, like Skye was Cinderella and not a total fuck-up breaking out in goosebumps over the girl at her feet.

//

"I usually move faster than this," Skye told May. She meant the current situation (running very fast for her life), and not the Simmons situation, but Simmons was right there, ten feet ahead, arms and legs pumping and ponytail flying out behind. It was hard _not_ to think about her, and it was certainly nicer to think about Simmons -- about the swell of her breasts under yesterday's white collared shirt, and the wrinkly-nosed face she made when she laughed -- than to think about the things Skye had done to get them out into this field.

"Stop talking," May suggested. "Save your air for running."

Simmons shrieked and went down, vanishing out of sight in the tall grass, and Skye veered slightly left, heart pounding, gasping for breath and aiming for Simmons' last visible location. The shouting behind them was growing steadily louder and more distracting, but Skye focused, pulling up a little and -- there. She grabbed Simmons' flailing hand and yanked her to her feet, tangling their fingers together.

They held hands all through the running, and all through the emergency pickup, and all through the final helicopter ride. Simmons rubbed her thumb over Skye's wrist any time that Skye felt like standing up and shouting at people, as though she had a special ability to tell whenever Skye was particularly close to losing it.

"You made an excellent partner in government-sanctioned crime," Simmons told her, forcefully cheerful, but there was genuine gratitude in her eyes.

"Please don't say the 'c' word until the CIA has dropped you off and left," Coulson said, over the comm line.

Simmons squeezed Skye's hand one more time, then let go, but she strode off to bully someone into donating their jacket, and she brought it back and draped it over Skye's shoulders. 

"The guy you hit is gonna live, Skye," Ward said.

Simmons smoothed her hand over Skye's back through the worst of the shudders.

//

There was a quiet knock at her bunk door. Three in the morning, but Skye was still awake, and somehow she knew, before she even opened the door, that it would be Simmons standing there.

"Come on, then," Simmons said, holding out her hand and wiggling her fingers until Skye took it.

They set up shop in the kitchenette, and Simmons looked at her own slippers on Skye's feet, but didn't say anything. She _did_ say something when she opened the freezer and discovered Coulson's name all over the chocolate cake. "Have we been eating Agent Coulson's cake the whole time?" she said, sounding horrified, but she cut them both large slices.

Fifteen minutes into Simmons' YouTube favourites list, she swung around on her stool and pressed Skye up against the counter, pressed warm against her chest, and when she kissed Skye she tasted like grocery store sheet cake and too-sweet chocolate icing, and she moaned, gratifyingly, into Skye's mouth when she reached back and sunk her hands into Simmons' hair.

They pulled apart when Skye managed to elbow her plate right off the counter, crumbs and icing flying across the floor and multiplying immediately, mysteriously, in the manner of inconvenient messes everywhere. When Skye looked back up, though, Simmons was grinning: waiting for Skye to catch her eye, waiting for Skye to smile back at her.

Simmons said, "Look at you.”


End file.
